Saturday, August 07, 2010

NOTE: The following was an article I wrote for a list-oriented comedy site. They didn't want it (actually, they never read it, as the idea was rejected at the pitch stage). I'd already written the article when I gave the pitch, to no real response, and I can't really do anything else with it, so I'm simply posting it here.

Five Family-Friendly Games that can Damage Relationships

by ray succre

There are a variety of games that exist for gatherings of family and friends. Perfection, Mousetrap, LIFE, Jenga, watching dad drink a pint of Old Forester and sneak up behind Aunt Cathy with his pants down in front of the whole family as he swabs his genitals across her ear, saying, “Everybody’s asleep. Ssh. Huh? Who’s in what room?” Over the course of past eras, many games have been invented as ways to consume a night’s time among people you somewhat have no choice but to spend time with. There are some games, however, that simply have no place being played among friends and loved ones, no matter how family-oriented they claim to be. These games contain specific gameplay elements that run a high risk of endicksulating the people who play them. It’s all fun and games at first, but inevitably, some people can’t play these games without douching out on the people around them. Hell, even a game as old-timey as and quiet as chess can erupt in violence, leading to news articles with actual quotes like: “…had to throw the pieces out, they were covered in so much blood”. We’ve compiled a list of the top five perpetrators, and with each, we have tried to capture the undercurrents as to how these games are so expert at planting the seeds of anger, mistrust, and outright despisal needed to damage a relationship in but a few sittings. These are games to hate your family over, mass-produced pastimes of mild fun that can go so wrong they actually end friendships and can lead to assault.

#5. Connect Four

Hasbro’s Equivalent of Standing in a Doorway and Refusing to Let People Through

I know what your thinking: What’s wrong with Connect Four? It doesn’t seem all that confrontational. It’s just an old school good time waiting to happen, right?

Connect Four is the very defining nature of confrontation. Two competitors sit across from each other, engaging in uncomfortable proximity and a mortifying stare-down, taking turns trying to foil, and finally, defeat the other. This is so close to the definition of confrontation that the previous sentence could almost be used as a description of warfare in general. The reason a rather innocuous setup like the rack in Connect Four is so ugly in intent is due to the way the game is played. Every time you place a colored round into a slot, you’re giving a quiet, logic-inspired ‘fuck you’ to the other player. You’re using the rounds as symbols for a trench-warfare of wits. You spend more time trying to shut down the other player than you do trying to win, yourself. Really, you’re trying to defeat your opponent’s MIND, which many psychologists would argue is the core, personal makeup of a person’s self. You’re not taking property, you’re not stealing, you’re not using chance to out-luck your competitor, you’re trying to use the strength of your mind and some two-moves-away planning to thwart your opponent’s mind and his two-moves-away planning. You’re showing that, were the two of you living in a more primitive time, you would get the women and first go at any carcass, and they would gnaw on rotted leftovers, exposing the bones you might later pick up and use to pummel them if they got out of line.

“The red circle is all. Behold, the weight of my mind now manifest.

Accept your defeat, yellow tribe, and fetch me your women.”

Here’s an example: You sit across from your seven-year-old son (because only a child could confuse bright red and yellow circles of mental domination and subjugation as fun). You drop a yellow circle down into the machine of your confrontation, the hole-punched, plastic battlefield of wits. Your son lifts a red circle and drops it beside yours. Were you planning on heading to the right, daddy? Because fuck you. You respond by dropping another yellow circle beside the first, to the left. You now have two in a row. He reacts by dropping his red piece and cutting off your progression, sealing your two pieces between his juggernauts of red death. What’s wrong, daddy? Have to start over now? Yes, yes you do.

And the game continues until one of you gets four of your colored rounds to line up without being broken by your enemy’s troops. When you destroy your seven-year-old son’s feeble attempt at standing up against your magnificent, adult brain, when you crush him with bright color, he loves you less. Just a little. You are now two or three obligatory Connect Four rematches from your child screaming ‘I hate you!’ and crying himself to sleep. If you let him win a few games, he’ll begin to think even less of you than had you won: I want candy for dinner. Why do I need to eat these cruddy vegetables? Because dad said? I’ve learned recently that dad doesn’t know shit from a yellow dot. Goodbye vegetables, hello diabetes.

#4. Scrabble

The Game of Rule Pigs and Obsessive Compulsion

The nature of Scrabble can be fun, and consists of drawing seven, random letters from a bag, and then trying to form them into a word on the board, oftentimes playing off of letters and words placed in previous turns. The strategy sound, provided you don’t mind having to make a word out this hand, which seems to happen more often than ‘random’ would imply: Q, Z, R, T, S, N, and B. On the opposite side of Scrabble fate, you could very well end up with a hand of E, E, A, I, A, O, and Y. You can’t make anything with the first set (though you’ll hold out forever on a U and an A so you can make the devastating QUARTZ). As for the all-vowel setup (and sometimes Y), it never ends well; using whatever genius you possess to make EYE and YO makes you feel stupid.

You sit down to have some fun with a friend or two, maybe have a beer and play around with some letters. The problem is that some people take Scrabble way too seriously. These are opponents that have to look up every good word you use, or keep monstrous dictionaries in play. There are also a lot of innocent procedures that on the surface seem like simple point-gathering, but end up causing small amounts of annoyance that add up over time, like when someone simply places an ‘S’ at the end of one of your words and gets more points than you did for it. There are also people that refer to the rules of Scrabble with such solemnity, you simply can’t handle playing with them. They use the phrase ‘no proper nouns’ with such speed and fortitude that it almost seems as if they’re using it as a sort of verbal slap in the face, and yet if you try to call to mind that same rule during their turn, they outmaneuver you like a Bond villain with a cleverly concealed escape hatch. For instance, they use a few letters to turn AGO into CHICAGO, to which you respond, “Oh, you can’t use the name of a place, man. That’s a proper noun,” only to have them yawn against your insignificance and cooly explain with the nonchalant wave of an arm, “The style of pizza”.

Naw, cuz check this out: ‘Snoop’ can be a adjective, dog.

The biggest problem with Scrabble is that some people consider it with such tactical reverence that they sap all the joy out of playing. These people are so into Scrabble that there are televised competitions. That’s right, people that are really into Scrabble are actually filmed playing Scrabble so that other people that are really into Scrabble can sit on their couch and see just how really into Scrabble these champions are. There are even documentaries about the televising of the competitions of the people that are really into Scrabble, documentaries that are over two hours in length. Watching one of these is only slightly less irritating than playing Scrabble against a rule pig.

Are you tired of hearing the word Scrabble, yet? Of course you are. It’s just some game you’ve played a few times. That’s all. Certain other people… not so calm about it. Violence has occurred while playing it, ending in murder. Take a look at this article, which digs into the strange incessancy with which Scrabble is mentioned in works of fiction that often connect it to sleaze, obsession, lust, mental illness, and outright homicide.

The forms of horror a serious Scrabbler can wreak upon you take on many guises, and as with other games, there are certain bothersome moves opponents can use in to torment their opponent. This is staple, but with Scrabble, there are fewer of these dick moves than there are dick types. There are three known, and many more possible. Types like:

The Lexicographer

The lexicographer challenges just about everything you come up with, devalues your poor attempts at spelling, and doubts the definitions you offer. The lexicographer enjoys chuckling lightly when you’re placing your letters down, and is the sort that has a massive dictionary pretty much for the purpose of pissing you off during the one and only time you or anyone else plays Scrabble with them. These people want a definition for everything, even the simplest of words, just because they know they can ask for one.

“Good word. Define it.” “Zap? Are you serious? All right, fine. A zap is… when… when something… it’s like a… ah, come on. We both know what the hell ‘zap’ means.”

They usually begin showing their more troublesome colors once you’ve placed a non-obvious word, and begin asking you the definition, which the Lexicographer will be inviolably picky about. “I don’t know about that… give me the definition.” “A ‘brocket’ is a deer,” you say. The Lexicographer begins looking it up. “See. A deer,” you repeat. You’re smart. You watched the nature channel last week and you didn’t fall asleep or anything. There were volcanos. Also brockets. “Eh, I can’t accept that. It’s in here, but uh, you’ll have to be more specific." “Fine, Alex Trebek. A damn brocket is a… a deer that’s from some other country… they have horns… it’s a deer, pretty much. Just a deer. I think they’re young, too. Like a buck. Yeah, a brocket is like a buck. Give me the points.” “Sorry, man. It says a brocket is ‘A male, South American red deer in its second year’. You weren’t specific enough.”

“I slept with your wife.”

“What? Which one?!”

“First one. She talked you into getting the vasectomy? FYI, that was my idea.”

The Referee

The Referee is that person so quick to jump into the Scrabble rulebook they purchased, that any sort of fun one might glean from playing with them is completely nullified. These are the above-mentioned rule pigs. Playing against a Referee is like trying to play with an intensive bureaucrat who doesn’t realize he’s off work. He hogs over the handbook with such zeal that the game may as well have been shipped to stores in a layer of thick, red tape. In order to be acceptable, every move must be technically correct.

Meme phrase.

Let’s say the word AXIS has been played vertically. Later in the game, you place another A beside the X. The Referee balks. Rather than let you have your paltry nine points and get rid of one of your seven vowels, he blusters and puts his hands up.

“Uh, no. AX is not a word. You have to put an E on the end.”

“Actually, the one time I played with Tom, he said the same thing, and then he looked it up. Both AX and AXE are correct. They’re both in the dictionary.”

“Both?” he questions, aggravated, reaching for his handbook of Scrabble rules and flipping through it with agitation, looking for any particular rule that tells him how he should logistically react when encountering two correct spellings. He is unwilling to let you have the nine crappy points your placement of A would net until he absolutely has to. Ten minutes of abject boredom go by, minutes wherein you replay the series of events that led to the board game gulag you are now trapped in, and when the Referee doesn’t find a rule regarding dual spelling, he gives you the damn points and then ceases talking to you at all. The silent treatment. Nothing but the sound of tiny blocks of wood being nudged into little square spaces of hatred. He only breaks this punishment of silence near the end of the game, when it seems you are going to win, barely.

“Just so you know, you cheated. You’re a cheat.”

“Your fiance is crazy hot.”

“Huh? I’m not engaged. Dude, I’m never getting married.”

“I know. I just thought it might be good for you to hear yourself say it.”

The Scout

While The Lexicographer may be the most irritating sort of person to play a game of Scrabble with, The Scout is the most horrifying of the bunch. The Scout has spent so much time calculating how to win at Scrabble, that when your novice ass comes over and you make the mistake, usually after a few beers, of agreeing to play, the storm of potent moves begins. Not only does The Scout know how to play, and well, but he has managed to memorize a vast army of tiny, potent, archaic words, allowing him to play things like YCLEPT, ZEL, and PYX. The Scout has done reconnaissance, you see. Scrabble black ops. He has, outside of game time, looked up strategies and calculated letter potential. He has waded into the depths of unknown (yet still somehow existent) words that allow him to play off of nearly anything. These are his power plays, and they are going to send you into a deep murk of douchbaggravation in the very near future. In his study of Scrabble (his study), the Scout has crammed so many words up his brain-ass that you don’t really stand much of a chance against him. Playing against a Scout will ruin the game for you, not just for a week or two, but forever. They’re like vampires, in that once you’ve experienced the massive defeat a Scout offers you, you have no choice but to give up Scrabble forever, or, growing angry and vengeful, become a Scout yourself.

The thing that makes a Scout so much more unbearable is that, rather than use his bizarre obsession skill to try his hand in Scrabble tournaments, against other lonely people more to his compulsion caliber, he instead chooses to feed you beer and then crush your unsuspecting mind with the strength of his personality disorder forethought. It’s like a soccer champion pretending to be in a wheelchair, approaching another man in a wheelchair and challenging him to a fun race through a grassy field, and when the second man agrees and begins wheeling toward the field, the champion rises out of his wheelchair, strips down to his customized running shorts (complete with his corporate sponsor’s logo on the side), and begins putting on his thousand dollar running shoes.

“What the hell is pyx? Is that a real word?” you make the mistake of voicing. The Scout will then snap into a strange monotone, as if an old reel-to-reel has been activated and a soulless narrator has possessed him.

“Pyx. A box or vessel in which coins or consecrated Eucharist are kept.”

“Is that actually in the dictionary?” you ask, again making a terrible mistake. A Scout almost always doubles as a Lexicographer. He is a living, breathing one-two punch of lingual douchbaggery. After asking your question, he reaches beneath his ratty, mustard-stained couch and lugs out a dusty, four-pound, hard-covered tome of the English language, compiled nearly ninety years ago. He then slides the dictionary over to you with a look of complacency.

“It’s in the ‘P’ section.”

“I had sex with your wife.”

“What? When?!”

“Any day now. What’s Eucharist?”

Of course, like all games, Scrabble is designed for some thoughtful, time-wasting entertainment. It’s fun to play with words and pray to whatever deity you suppose to be overlooking the board and the awkward wanweird of your Thursday night, asking that you be granted the miracle of a vowel sometime soon. As writers, losing at Scrabble ranks about as high on our list of fun activities as gathering around the dilapidated bed and saying quiet goodbyes to the pale, jabbering husk we’ve been told is still, somehow grandpa.

“Twenty-four points. No, wanweird is a word. Fine, it refers to ‘an unfortunate fate’. Well, I don’t care if it’s not in there. Gaydar wasn’t in there but I gave it to you, so now you have to give me wanweird. Dude, stop removing my let- oh, you are such an ass.”

#3. SORRY!

The Game for Enforced, Obnoxious In-Your-Facing

The premise behind the hit Parker Brothers (a subsidiary of Hasbro) game SORRY! is that you have a skinny, cartoon phallus (four of them, actually), and draw cards that give you the number of spaces you can move. That’s after you’re out of the “start” spot. In order to get out of your initial start spot, you have to continually draw cards, turn after turn, until the lucky number turns up, in order to give you the right to begin moving your little, pointy dong around the board. After the ninth or tenth roll, the number finally arrives and you are granted the ability actually to start playing the game, moving your piece, turn by turn, around the square board. The idea is to go all the way around the board, and then take your cartoon phallus piece up a taller, more bulbous cartoon phallus until you’re “home”, at which point you retire the piece and then try to get your other three pieces up the same phallus row to home. At times, you might hit a “slide” arrow, which sends you down a few extra spaces of movement, just to be nice and help things along. This is to make up for what happens next.

At any point someone lands their pointy plastic dong on a space that already contains your pointy plastic dong (and due to the law of nature that disallows mutual dongship in confined squares), you’re piece is removed and sent back to start, where you have to again roll numerous times for the right to begin playing the game again. This cycle happens over and over. Unfortunately, this is not all that happens when you’re sent back to start. The player that screwed you gets to then say the relished, sarcastic term for which the game was named. They take your piece and carelessly fling it back toward your start space, knowing they’ve just set you back about eight turns, and then raise their voice with a phony, clownish smile, and bray out: “SSSSOOOOOOOOOORRRY!”

Yes, it’s in the rules that you have to exclaim this. If you had any doubts, they printed the name of the game itself in a font that seems to be somehow both sympathetic and saying ‘Loser!’ at the same time. The name is also in all-caps, bold-faced, with an exclamation point, letting you know right from the moment you first set the game on the table that some obnoxious, caustic jackassery is coming your way in the near future.

To be straight here, this is the only time in one’s life when this word can be uttered in such a hideous, grating tone without it being responded to with a knee to the groin.

“Dude, just tell me. Have you been messing around with my sister?”

“Yeah. But it was her idea. Whatever.”

“No, not whatever. That’s a really big deal. She’s still taking Language Arts and you can hang out in bars.” “Pff. Yeah, she was all like, unexpecting and trying to seem all brave or something, and I just totally wrecked her and sent her ability to trust all the way back to start. SSSSOOOOOOORRRY!”

#2. Monopoly

The Simulation of Socioeconomic Despotism

Monopoly is the longstanding golden son of Parker Brothers/Hasbro games. The game takes an atrocious, highly illegal, corporate business-model of absolute, economic tyranny (a system that forces the ruination of hopes and dreams, causes suicides, and destroys all it touches) and has you try it out on your loved ones. For… for fun. Still aren’t sold that Monopoly is a game that could cause more than hurt feelings? Tell that to Kenneth Repke, who, after having his bid to purchase Park Place was declined by his old lady neighbor, leaped from his chair and slapped her out of her chair, landing him in jail for assault. At some point, the arch-demons at Parker Brothers apparently decided that turning grotesque human malignancy into a toy was great, wholesome entertainment. They could have just as easily made a game that portrayed forced slave breeding in a cheery, family light, or even a board game themed around death row social hierarchy.

“Ha ha, you’re about to get some spokes knocked out of your meatwheel!”

“Nope, try again. I still have a Shank Card.”

“Damn it! I never get the Shank Card.”

“Looks like you’re stuck in the infirmary with Dr. Touchy until you roll a seven. Maybe it’s karma for always taking the bedsheet-noose when you know it’s the piece I want to play.”

Despite the sociopath level of fun a biological warfare themed board game might have given mom and dad, Parker Brothers chose to go with corporate monopoly, and that over the mass-ownership and renovation of urban property, where you destroy with money and soul-less, contractual phalanxes, rather than with sharpened broom-handles and toilet drownings. Why? Because snaking the land out from under people is a blast! You buy a cheap spot, fix it up a little, and then crank up the rent to absurd levels. Sound familiar? Yeah, you know people effected by this behavior in real life, except they lose out on real homes, instead of scraps of orange paper. But forget all that, you’re turning the pawn shops into your own private Hiltons and running utilities as if they were check-cash stands. Soon enough, you'll be sitting pretty with a couple of high-priced hotels on a handful of city streets. As for anyone living on the other side of the tracks... Hey, no problem. You bought out the tracks, as well as their sources of water and electricity. The money comes rolling in.

The premise is that you purchase spaces on the board as property, or purchase a space that serves as a utility, and then let your inner slumlord out by charging exorbitant rent to anyone that has the misfortune of landing on your property, and a nagging sort of fee to anyone who lands on one of your utilities. You’re basically role-playing a pipe-wielding superintendent banging on a door at four in the morning and shouting, “All right, fucko, I know you’re in there. You’re rent’s late. I don’t care if you’re paraplegic, you wake up and crawl your ass to the door and pay me, or pack your shit.” The game is incredibly boring for the first three hours, until everyone owns just about everything available. All but one player will have scattered properties that are somewhat useless on their own, due to the wondrous random nature of rolling dice. One player, however, will own a whole set of high-end property, also somewhat by random chance. Now the game kicks into gear, and all the buying and spending and dice-rolling and time in jail and missed turns (which allow your opponents to gather up every scrap of property you still needed to complete your own monopoly) will finally pay off.

And pay off, it does. In about three, short turns. The power of chance turns up whatever number you least wanted, and you end up being tossed onto their property, and they grin, smug, as they say, “All three properties with hotels on each. Oh ho. Looks like you owe me three grand.” You scowl as you look over your fake money, which is about four-hundred dollars worth of fives and tens and that single twenty you’ve been saving. You go over your assets, then. Your properties. Nope. They amount to another six-hundred bucks. You have been financially ruined, execution-style. You’re out of the game, and the person with the monopoly gets even stronger by taking all of your things for their own, setting up more monopolies. It is only a matter of time before the game lands each player, one by one, like a slow deathmarch, onto the high-stakes property that took you out, which instantly ruins them, as well. The game ends and the winner leans back and says, “Eh, it’s only a game,” and “We should do that again sometime. That was fun,” which are code, respectively, for “Don’t be a sore loser, loser,” and “pwned lol”, cluing you in on just how much they’ve enjoyed destroying the past three hours of your life.

“Hey grandma?”

“Hmm?”

“You know what?”

“What’s that, dear?”

“Fuck Park Place and fuck you. I’m leaving.”

“Oh? But honey, the nursing home only allows one visitation a week!”

“Well, maybe you should have thought about that beforehand, Ms. Fat-Cash.”

“Please don’t leave. They feed us bugs.”

“I wish you were grandpa.”

Still not convinced? Here’s a forum thread chock full of people complaining about the level of animosity that Monopoly creates.

#1. UNO

Cards, Conquest, and Royally Screwing Your Loved Ones

Uno is the only game in this list that is not owned by Hasbro or its subsidiary, Parker Brothers. Uno is a product maintained by Mattel, and considering the level of vitriol in the previous games on this list, one might assume you would need a thousand men shouting every terrible thing they could think of for five straight years in order to meet the level of dickishness needed to beat out Hasbro in the top spot of this list, as Hasbro seems to have cornered the market on disguising hostility and detriment as clean, family fun. We’re probably overreacting in placing UNO on this list, because it’s not as if anyone has ever lost their shit, beaten their family, and threatened them with a knife because of it.

The basis of Uno is quite simple. Everyone starts with seven cards. The cards are generally, but not always, numbered and colored. Someone puts a card down. Then you have to play a card of the same number or color. You do, and play moves to the next player. The first person to run out of cards is the winner. Of course, it is yet another game wherein something is annoyingly shouted at you right before you get the shaft, but still otherwise innocuous.

“No! NOOOOO! I had UNO! I had UNO!”

The aggravation comes when you begin seeing the directive cards. Remember, you’re trying to get rid of your cards, but if the person before you plays one of these directive cards, you either lose a turn or are forced to pick up yet more cards and lose a turn. Draw Two makes you do just that, setting you back two turns as well as missing your current turn. SKIP makes you lose your turn. REVERSE makes you lose your turn in a slightly different way. When Uncle Hank runs out of cards he can screw you with, he can play a REVERSE card, which reverses the rotation of play, thus letting Aunt Myrna a chance to unload her cards on you, too. The worst by far is the Draw Four card, which not only costs you a turn, but sets you back FOUR MORE turns, by making you pick up four more cards. Basically, getting a directive card used on you in UNO is about giving you ‘turn debt’ while everyone else happily goes along winning, or being screwed, themselves.

So, your waist deep in a heated UNO game with the family, and you’ve been kicked in the sweet spot by dad three times now, and everyone seems to have the power to reverse the deck whenever you actually have something you can play. This is annoying enough, but you’ve been hit with a Draw Two card and not one, but TWO Draw Four cards. Now you have about eighteen cards, and everyone else is down to two or three. You are not going to win. The depths to which you are being screwed are more pronounced than those on the receiving end of the Pepperidge Farms product that wanders around beneath Ron Jeremy’s fatbelly. Your ability to even stomach this game is dropping with every turn, and you’re not losing due to your own ineptness, or failure to grasp the rules, or even due to the expert skills of other players, or luck, for that matter. You’re losing in direct proportion to the impudence of the people around you, and you aren’t even being allowed to play, which lowers the dickhead bar so close to the ground that even your mild-mannered great uncle seems willing to step on your balls in boots, and is probably flipping you off beneath the table. You get so quietly angry (because it’s just a game, which means that your unavoidable anger is also unacceptable), that you don’t even want to look at them. They’ve made you a receptacle for all the shit cards one can use. You’re the Draw Four dumpster.

The cycle seems like it will end and you’ll finally be able to unload all the high-point cards weighing down your hand, but no… you are then made to draw two cards again. Then you get skipped. This continual torture just means you’re not only being robbed of turns, but everyone else is being given more instances in which they can rid themselves of cards. When someone wins, all those cards they crammed in your hands with their dickishness benefits them, as they are tabulated into a score they get to keep. Their level of win is determined by your level of loss. You could easily end up with a veritable deck in your hands, and then the hammer falls and the person preceding you says: “Ooh, looks like somebody has to Draw Four! Again, heh heh. Oh, and UNO!”

This is when you smash your bottle and leap across the table, grabbing their hair in one hand and jerking their head to the side, swinging the busted glass wildly with the other arm and bellowing “I’LL CUT THAT LARCENOUS LOOK RIGHT OFF YOUR FUCKING FACE, MOM,” while exposing that soft target of check-flesh just waiting to know what happens when someone wrongs you.

All of the games mentioned here bear the ability to bring out the sadistic side of players, but of these, UNO is the easiest game to lose your friends and loved ones to. Having sold over 150 million copies worldwide since being created in the early seventies, UNO just might be responsible for more disintegrated marriages and familial isolation than Everquest and World of Warcraft combined. It’s a deck-based kick to the nuts. You might find on Wikipedia that the original creator of this game was also the pioneer of the deadly cocktail that makes up our modern day lethal injection, but you just as well might not find that. This in no way makes it any less plausible.

UNO is a game that slowly, round after round, breeds hatred and despisal. Quietly. Ask our mother. Two nasal reconstructions, an incapacitating pain-pill addiction, and a cheap, plastic mask later… well, she knows what she did.